Paragraph 2:4–10a

Peter wrote this paragraph mainly to support what he said in 2:3b–c. He supported what he had said by telling three examples from the OT of how God punished wicked people and rescued people who obeyed him. These were examples with which the people to whom he wrote this letter would have been familiar.

In the Greek this whole paragraph is one long sentence, but it may be necessary for you to break it up. Read Good News Translation and notice how that version has broken the one sentence into several shorter sentences. Perhaps you should begin this paragraph with “See” or “You know that.” Think about whether that would help people who read your translation to understand that Peter was starting to prove a point here. You may even need to repeat the “See” or “You know that” each time Peter used a new example.

Although verses 4, 5, 6, 7 and 9 begin with “if” in the Berean Standard Bible, this is not because the events which Peter was talking about may not have happened. These events all did happen. This use of “if” in English (and Greek) was to prove a point, here what Peter said in verse 9. The Good News Translation shows one way to communicate this meaning without using the word “if” at all.

2:4

For: Peter was now going to say why God would certainly punish the false teachers. Good News Translation and Contemporary English Version consider the link between the previous paragraph and the one that starts here in 2:4 to be clear enough, so they do not include any explicit translation of “For.” If it is necessary to clearly state the link in your language, you could say something like:

I say that God is going to punish them because…

2:4a

God did not spare the angels: This means that he did not overlook their sin. Instead, he punished them.

angels: The first example from the OT that Peter wrote about is what happened to the wicked angels. Scholars do not know for certain which angels were being referred to. (Bible scholars are not certain who these angels were. Some think the angels are “the sons of God” that Genesis 6:1–4 mentions, who came down to earth and married human women. But other scholars strongly disagree. They say that the phrase “sons of God” in Genesis does not refer to angels at all but rather to the descendants of Adam’s son, Seth. (One of the reasons they say that Genesis 6 does not refer to angels is because Jesus said in Mark 12:25 that angels do not marry.))

2:4b

hell: The Jews and Greeks who lived at the time when Peter was writing his letter believed that there was a deep pit under the earth where God imprisoned wicked angels and humans in order to punish them.

2:4c

chains of darkness: There is a problem in the Greek text here. Some manuscripts have “chains (seirais) of gloom” while others have “pits (sirois) of gloom.” That is why Berean Standard Bible says “chains of darkness” while some translations say “gloomy dungeons.” But the meaning of the two possible Greek phrases is almost the same. They both mean that God has imprisoned the wicked angels.

darkness: This means “nearly dark.” The word describes what a place looks like when there is almost no light there.

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All Scripture quotations in this publication, unless otherwise indicated, are from The Holy Bible, Berean Standard Bible. BSB is produced in cooperation with Bible Hub, Discovery Bible, OpenBible.com, and the Berean Bible Translation Committee.